Ferrying by Xixi Quan and Kau Chan Reimagines Community Retail through Cultural Heritage

Exploring How This Silver A Design Award Winning Interior Inspires Brands to Build Meaningful Community Spaces through Heritage and Innovation

What happens when a bookstore decides to become a village? Picture the following scene: you walk into a retail space and suddenly find yourself standing beside a river that winds past tiny houses, under an ancient octagonal pavilion, past a pixelated mythical beast, and into a miniature town square where neighbors gather to read and talk. The Ferrying compound bookstore in Guangzhou, China, accomplishes precisely such a transformation through an approach that converts cultural heritage into lived commercial experience.

For brands seeking to create spaces where customers genuinely want to spend time, where purchases become secondary to the joy of simply being there, Ferrying offers a fascinating case study in heritage-informed design. The project, designed by Xixi Quan and Kau Chan for MUST Design Digital Construction Laboratory at Macau University of Science and Technology, received a Silver A Design Award in Interior Space, Retail and Exhibition Design in 2025. The recognition highlights the bookstore's creative excellence and innovative approach to community-centered retail.

The question many brand managers and commercial space developers ask themselves is deceptively simple: How do we make people feel like they belong here? Ferrying answers the question of belonging by literally embedding local identity into the building's walls, floors, and spatial logic. The designers did not assume they knew what the community wanted. They asked. They researched. They listened. And then the team built something that reflects centuries of local culture while serving contemporary needs for coffee, books, children's play spaces, and places to simply exist together.

The following analysis explores the specific strategies, techniques, and thinking behind Ferrying, offering insights that any brand developing community spaces can apply to future projects.

Understanding the Research Foundation That Shapes Authentic Community Spaces

Before a single line was drawn or material selected, the design team behind Ferrying engaged in something that many commercial projects skip entirely: rigorous qualitative research into what residents actually wanted from a community space. Using qualitative data analysis software to examine information collected from Nansha community residents, the team uncovered five specific insights that would shape every design decision that followed.

First, residents expressed genuine interest in continuing their traditional cultural context. The interest was not nostalgia for nostalgia's sake but rather a desire to see local heritage reflected in contemporary spaces. Second, the demand for relaxed composite parent-child spaces emerged as a primary need, meaning places where children could read, socialize, and play while parents could work, connect with others, and enjoy their own time. Third, residents wanted small aesthetic gathering spaces that supplemented existing libraries and community centers, spaces full of friendly memories and artistic atmosphere where community members could hold literary salons and workshops.

Fourth, and perhaps most commercially relevant, residents indicated interest in non-standard retail offerings: distinctive handmade products, exquisite lifestyle items, and niche brands that differ from standard market offerings. Fifth, book categories should emphasize literature, popular science, psychology, art, life, and children's titles.

The research approach employed at Ferrying offers a template for any brand developing community spaces. The key insight is not just that research matters but that specific types of research yield specific types of actionable information. Quantitative data might tell you how many people want a bookstore, but qualitative analysis reveals that residents want a literary living room where they can discover their inner strength and find opportunities to discover a new self. These phrases come directly from the research findings and shaped the emotional architecture of the space as much as any floor plan.

For brands, the research-first methodology demonstrates how community engagement can drive design decisions that create genuine loyalty rather than transactional relationships. When people see their expressed needs reflected in physical form, they recognize themselves in the space. That recognition becomes belonging.

Translating Local Heritage into Spatial Organization and Narrative

The genius of Ferrying lies in how the design transforms abstract cultural heritage into concrete spatial experience. Nansha's traditional villages developed within the Pearl River system in southern China, where boats served as essential transportation and the waterways shaped daily life. Western artillery emplacements and buildings from centuries past still stand in the region. The Qilin, a mythical beast considered auspicious, remains central to local cultural identity through the inherited Qilin dance tradition.

Rather than treating heritage elements as decorative afterthoughts, the designers made cultural references the organizational logic of the entire space. The first floor operates as an abstract traditional water town block where a conceptual river connects different programmatic areas. Books, commodities, and salon spaces are linked by the metaphorical waterway, with small bridges, village houses, miniature squares, a Chinese octagonal pavilion, ferry crossings, and the Qilin all positioned as architectural features that visitors encounter while moving through the space.

The wooden boat display stands are particularly remarkable. Custom-made in an actual wooden boat factory, the boat fixtures ensure the creation of what the designers call local aesthetic atmosphere. The pieces are not reproductions or stylizations of boats but actual artifacts of boat-making tradition repurposed as retail fixtures. When a book sits in a vessel designed to navigate the Pearl River, the act of browsing becomes something more than shopping. Browsing becomes participation in centuries of regional history.

The pixelated Qilin, assembled from wooden modules, represents another strategy for honoring tradition while speaking contemporary visual language. By abstracting the mythical creature into a modular form, the designers acknowledge that heritage can evolve without losing essential meaning. Children encounter the Qilin not as a museum piece but as a playful presence that connects them to ancestral beliefs in forms young visitors can understand.

The approach to heritage translation offers brands a crucial lesson: cultural elements work best when they shape experience rather than merely decorate a space. The river is not painted on the floor. The river is the organizing principle that determines how visitors move, what visitors encounter, and how different activities relate to one another.

Smart Fabrication Strategies That Achieve Sophistication on Constrained Budgets

Ferrying operates as a public welfare space, which meant working within significant budget constraints. The designers responded by embracing rather than fighting the limitations, making choices that demonstrate how sophisticated design outcomes can emerge from practical resourcefulness.

The ceiling remains exposed. Floor materials consist of cement self-leveling, terrazzo, clay bricks, and granite, all traditional local materials that carry cultural resonance while minimizing cost. The houses with their sloping roofs, the octagonal pavilion, and the subway train structures are composed of simple steel structure lines rather than solid construction. The skeletal approach creates visual interest through rhythm and repetition rather than expensive finishes.

The parametric design of the subway train in the children's area deserves particular attention. Using parametric design software, the team generated rhythmic undulating steel structure lines that accommodate children of different ages and their various movements. The design challenge required extremely fine scale data to ensure that the rhythmic lines could accommodate body movements of children at different developmental stages without creating safety issues. The parametric approach allowed complex, dynamic forms to emerge from relatively simple fabrication processes.

Factory prefabrication played a central role in cost management. The steel structure and metal keel of the fort-style white arch book corridor were prefabricated off-site, reducing on-site labor costs and construction time. The octagonal pavilion, however, presented a different challenge. The pavilion's mortise and tenon structure required traditional joinery techniques, and delicate indirect lighting was integrated to express what the designers describe as the coexistence of traditional structure and contemporary lighting aesthetics. Budget constraints required completing the octagonal pavilion element on-site in close collaboration with workers.

For brands developing physical spaces, Ferrying demonstrates that budget constraints can drive creative solutions rather than compromise design quality. The exposed ceiling becomes an honest expression of the building. The parametric generation of complex forms reduces labor while increasing visual sophistication. The strategic choice of where to invest in traditional craft versus where to employ industrial prefabrication reflects sophisticated project management that delivers maximum impact per dollar spent.

The lesson extends beyond construction techniques to design philosophy: constraints become creative opportunities when designers refuse to see limitations as barriers. Every material choice, every fabrication decision, and every structural approach in Ferrying reflects the productive tension between aspiration and resource reality.

Designing for Multiple Generations in Single Unified Spaces

One of the most commercially relevant aspects of Ferrying is the deliberate multi-generational design strategy. The research revealed that residents wanted spaces where children could engage in age-appropriate activities while parents pursued their own interests nearby. The designers responded by creating distinct but connected zones that serve different age groups without separating families.

The children's area takes the subway station as its theme, reflecting contemporary Nansha's development as a transit hub within the Greater Bay Area. The subway train body comprises undulating steel structure lines that fill the space with rhythm and energy. Children drill and climb through the lines, hang and swing on structural elements, and push and pull subway train doors in games of hide-and-seek. The driver's seat at the front of the train allows children to imagine themselves operating their own journey through the space.

Meanwhile, parents can enjoy coffee, tea, and aesthetic surroundings or work at nearby stations while maintaining visual connection to their children. The adjacency without overlap allows adults to have adult experiences while children have child experiences, all within the same architectural narrative.

The salon area at the end of the conceptual river brings generations together through its gathering atmosphere. Steps, the octagonal pavilion, wooden boats, houses, and sloping roofs create what the designers describe as a small village square ambiance. People naturally sit down to read and talk, meet new friends and have new stories. The architectural elements invite lingering rather than passing through.

The multi-generational approach offers significant lessons for brands developing family-oriented spaces. The key insight is that families do not want activities that force everyone to do the same thing. Families want proximity that allows different experiences to occur simultaneously. A child absorbed in climbing through parametric steel lines does not need a parent climbing beside them. That parent might prefer an excellent cup of tea in a beautifully designed space with a clear sightline to their playing child.

The commercial implications extend to dwell time, repeat visits, and the emotional associations that families develop with spaces that make complicated logistics easier to manage. When a space serves everyone in the family, that family returns.

Creating Commercial Spaces That Function as Community Living Rooms

The concept of the literary living room recurs throughout the Ferrying project documentation, and the framing reveals something essential about how brands can position commercial spaces for community significance. A living room is not a store. A living room is a place where people feel comfortable, where they linger without obligation to purchase, where relationships develop over time.

Ferrying achieves the living room quality through several specific design choices. The space provides reading, learning, and work areas alongside tea, coffee, and light meals. Augmented reality experience stations and workshops add programming variety. But more importantly, the spatial design communicates welcome rather than transaction. The river metaphor invites exploration. The village square atmosphere encourages gathering. The octagonal pavilion offers a focal point for conversation and events.

The research indicated that residents wanted spaces that would help them discover their inner strength and give them the opportunity to discover a new self. These are remarkable aspirations for a commercial space to fulfill, yet Ferrying attempts precisely such aspirations through the combination of cultural meaning, aesthetic quality, and functional versatility.

For brands considering similar approaches, the living room concept offers a useful frame for evaluating design decisions. Does a particular choice make people want to stay? Does the choice communicate that visitor presence is valued beyond purchasing power? Does the design create conditions for the kinds of experiences that build lasting emotional connection?

The product and book selection at Ferrying reflects the living room philosophy. Rather than standard offerings, the space features distinctive handmade products and exquisite lifestyle items that align with local aesthetic sensibilities. The book categories emphasize literature, popular science, psychology, art, life, and children's titles, categories that support personal development and family enrichment rather than mere entertainment.

Designers and brands interested in studying the approach to community space design can Explore the Complete Ferrying Bookstore Design Portfolio to examine specific details of how cultural heritage, spatial organization, material selection, and programmatic variety combine to create the literary living room effect.

Balancing Eastern and Western Influences in Contemporary Commercial Design

Ferrying explicitly identifies itself as a fusion of ancient and modern, East and West. The second floor introduces contemporary technological elements including parametric subway trains, augmented reality experience stations, and modern tea service alongside the heritage elements of the ground floor. The deliberate contrast creates what the designers describe as interest and attraction.

The Western influence in Nansha has historical roots. Artillery emplacements and buildings from European contact periods remain standing in the region. The designers acknowledge the layered history by incorporating fort-style white arch elements in the book corridor, creating architectural echoes of colonial presence without either celebrating or condemning the historical period. The arches simply exist as part of the visual vocabulary, one layer among many in a complex cultural landscape.

The approach to cultural mixing offers guidance for brands operating in regions with layered histories. Rather than choosing a single authentic tradition to reference, Ferrying embraces the full complexity of the regional context. The octagonal pavilion employs traditional mortise and tenon joinery while incorporating contemporary indirect lighting. The Qilin appears in pixelated form that acknowledges digital aesthetics. The subway train references infrastructure development that connects Nansha to the broader Pearl River Delta economy.

The key insight is that authenticity does not require temporal purity. A space can honor traditional forms while employing contemporary technologies. Designers can reference ancestral beliefs while speaking visual languages that children raised on digital media can understand. The contrast itself becomes a source of meaning, communicating that heritage is living rather than frozen, evolving rather than static.

For brands, the Ferrying example suggests that heritage-informed design need not become heritage-constrained design. The past offers resources for meaning-making, but past resources can be combined, abstracted, and transformed in service of contemporary needs and aesthetics.

Future Directions for Heritage-Informed Commercial Space Development

Ferrying opened in April 2023 after construction that began in November 2022. In the relatively short time since opening, the bookstore has become what the designers describe as a well-deserved literary living room in the hearts of community residents, a leisure and comfortable ocean of knowledge, and an elegant aesthetic space. The rapid integration into community life suggests that the research-driven, heritage-informed approach can deliver on its promises.

The project points toward several trends likely to shape commercial space development in coming years. First, qualitative research into community desires will increasingly inform design decisions, moving beyond demographic data toward understanding emotional needs and cultural aspirations. Second, digital fabrication technologies like parametric design will enable complex forms at manageable costs, expanding the aesthetic possibilities for projects with constrained budgets. Third, multi-generational design strategies will become standard practice as brands recognize that serving families means serving different age groups simultaneously rather than forcing compromise.

Fourth, and perhaps most significantly, the integration of cultural heritage into spatial organization rather than mere decoration will distinguish spaces that achieve genuine community significance from those that remain transactional retail environments. The river at Ferrying is not a painted graphic. The river is the organizing principle that determines movement, encounter, and relationship. The depth of heritage integration creates spaces that feel meaningful rather than merely themed.

The recognition of Ferrying with a Silver A Design Award in Interior Space, Retail and Exhibition Design acknowledges precisely the qualities demonstrated throughout the project: the creative excellence of translating cultural heritage into spatial experience, the technical innovation of parametric design and smart fabrication, and the notable achievement of creating community significance within commercial programming.

Closing Reflections on Building Spaces That Become Places

Ferrying demonstrates something that every brand developing physical spaces should understand: the difference between a space and a place. A space is a bounded volume. A place is a location where meaning accumulates, where people develop emotional attachments, where memories form and stories unfold. The same square meters can remain merely space forever or become deeply significant place within months.

The transformation from space to place at Ferrying occurred through deliberate design choices grounded in research, heritage, craft, and care. The designers asked what people wanted before assuming they knew. The team drew on centuries of local culture to create spatial logic that resonates with collective memory. The project employed traditional techniques alongside digital fabrication to achieve sophistication within constraints. The designers created spaces for families rather than abstract demographics.

The approaches demonstrated at Ferrying can be studied, adapted, and applied to projects in vastly different contexts. The specific heritage will change. The community desires will differ. The budget constraints will vary. But the underlying methodology of listening, translating, fabricating, and programming offers a transferable framework for brand spaces that aspire to community significance.

What might your next commercial space become if you approached the project as the design team at Ferrying approached a compound bookstore in Nansha, asking first what a community needs before deciding what a brand wants to sell?